The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Madame Bonnard’s eternal bathtime
The French artist’s pictures of his wife, soon on show at the Tate, suggest she scarcely left the tub. Can it be true?
When Pierre Bonnard travelled to the South of France in the summer of 1909, he experienced an epiphany. In a letter sent to his mother from St Tropez, the lanky, bespectacled modern painter compared the scenery, irradiated by a blazing sun, to the magical spectacle of One Thousand and One Nights.
Within a few years of his trip, his work had changed: intense, luminous colours replaced the muted palette that had characterised his earlier paintings of everyday urban life. Thus, the Bonnard we cherish today – an artist who specialised in intimate domestic interiors, flooded with light, as well as hazy landscapes suffused with well-being and a sense of “eternal summer” – was born.
Eventually, Bonnard would buy a home on the Côte d’Azur. In 1926, a year after marrying his long-term partner, Marthe de Méligny, he acquired a small hillside villa in the village of Le Cannet, overlooking the red rooftops of Cannes. Today, this pink-stuccoed, two-storey house, which Bonnard christened Le Bosquet (The Grove), is not open to the public. Recently, though, I visited it, in the hope of understanding more about this enigmatic artist ahead of a spellbinding new exhibition of his paintings at Tate Modern, which promises to brighten spirits on even the dreariest winter’s day.
After years of neglect, during which the artist’s estate was contested in a long-running court case, the villa’s rustic interior now appears largely as it did when Bonnard lived there: a glass-fronted cupboard still stands in the yellowwalled dining room, a familiar sight from many of his paintings. Upstairs, his triangular studio retains the large window through which, in winter, Bonnard would see the yellow flash of flowering mimosa.
Most mornings, he would take a walk through his garden and the surrounding area, among orange groves and almond trees, seeking inspiration. He is sometimes said to have extended the legacy of the impressionists and once referred to himself as “the last impressionist”, which may explain why he incurred the scorn of Picasso, who defined himself against impressionism, and privately called Bonnard’s painting “a potpourri of indecision”. Unlike them, however, Bonnard never painted in the open air, but rather from memory, alone in the studio.
Yet if Le Bosquet, where he spent much of the final two decades of his life, was a sort of modest, private paradise for Bonnard, to his friends, the place had a sinister aspect – less paradise, more prison. As he grew older, the artist – who died in 1947, aged 79 – became increasingly reclusive. While wearing workman’s clothes in his garden, he would turn away unwanted visitors, telling them: “Monsieur Bonnard is not in.” In a well-known series of photographs, taken at Le Bosquet by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1944, he appears feeble and unrelaxed, huddled in baggy clothes in various corners of sparsely furnished rooms, his face a shuttered mask.
For Bonnard’s former confidants, one person, above all, was to blame for his isolation: his wife, Marthe, who suffered from paranoid delusions. She was his jailer, they said, the cause of his self-imposed exile from the world. But she was also his most important muse, appearing in nearly 400 paintings, produced over 50 years.
In a brilliant but vicious essay, written to mark Tate’s last Bonnard exhibition, in 1998, the critic
John Richardson described her as the artist’s “amphibious wife”
– a reference to his famous series of paintings of Marthe bathing.
She seems to have spent much of her life in a bathtub, apparently believing that hydrotherapy would cure her various illnesses.
Exactly what afflicted her remains unclear: it has been suggested that she had tuberculosis, or an acute form of neurosis – hence the delusions.
One of Bonnard’s closest friends, a doctor, even recommended that she be committed to an asylum. Whatever the precise nature of her ailments, Bonnard and his wife spent much of the Twenties and Thirties shuttling between French spa towns in their pale-yellow Renault 11CV, so that Marthe could undergo water therapy (then a popular treatment).
The couple first met in Paris in 1893, when Bonnard, the son of a well-to-do civil servant, was still only in his mid-20s. Already a member of a bohemian brotherhood of mystical young artists who called themselves the Nabis (Hebrew for “prophets”), he had recently won acclaim for a racy poster advertising a popular brand of champagne, which inspired Toulouse-Lautrec to start designing posters, too.
Marthe, meanwhile, made paper flowers for a living, and happened to be selling violets on a corner of the Boulevard Haussmann when Bonnard helped her cross the street. A frail, waifish woman from a modest background, she told Bonnard that she came from a